This article features the most useful, best small business software tools that are integral to your success and easy to learn and install. We provide a curated selection of the best online small business software, from accounting, to project and email management, document storage, security software and more. This way you can get your small business running smoothly.

The testing of all desktop, web and mobile applications could be done easily by using Ranorex. It has a number of automation testing tools. Reusable test codes, GUI recognition, bug detection, Record and playback, Integration with various tools, etc. Are certain other highlights of Ranorex. Your automation testing goals can be achieved quickly by using this tool.

Sage Intacct is a cloud-based financial management platform that houses cloud computing and accounting in a single tool. The product’s apps are used by a wide array of businesses as they are preferred for AICPA business solutions. Designed to improve business performance and financial productivity, Sage Intacct is being offered by many accounting firms and resellers to their clientele.
You can (and should) regularly back up files to an external hard drive or NAS (network-attached storage) de­­vice in your office--but what if the whole place goes up in smoke? Hedge your bet with an online backup service like Mozy, which automatically archives whatever you'd like across the Internet, safe and sound. Just select what you want backed up, and Mozy does the rest, either in bulk while you sleep, or in real time, as files are changed. ($5 per month for unlimited service)
Automatically testing your web application is a good way to ensure that new versions of your application don't introduce bugs and regressions. Automation of your web application testing also allows your development team to make changes and refactor code with more confident, as they can quickly verify the functionality of the application after every change.
In this case, you could check the screens to see if they still created a user with the right setup, but once that's done, there's no need to recheck that create use works over and over. Instead, consider creating actual command-line parameters to speed up testing. In the example at the client, a simple command-line tool could have flipped the ratio from one hour a day of testing and seven hours of setup to seven hours of testing and one hour of setup.
Crispin and Gregory define Test-Driven Development (TDD) as the process of writing and automating small unit tests before writing the piece of code that will make the test pass. TDD is used for continuous integration testing to ensure small units of code work together first. A unit test verifies the behavior of a small part of the code in the overall system. These tests are the primary candidate for the majority of automated tests. Even teams that are not practicing Agile development use TDD to prevent defects and design software (Agile Testing, 2008).
Quickbooks has been around forever, and for good reason. The tool scales quickly from individual freelancers to small businesses to multinational enterprises, and offers lots of great business add-ons like payroll and payroll tax preparations. The most basic plans track payments, expenses, and invoices with a full reporting suite that gives small businesses deep insight into where their money comes from and goes to.
Watir is made to automate web application testing and this is done using Ruby libraries. Watir is also called as water by the people and is an open source testing tool. This tool can be used to tests any language-based web application. Watir works well with RSpec, Cucumber, and Test/Unit and is a business-driven development tool. It basically tests web page’s buttons, forms, links, and their responses. It can be used on a number of browsers as it is compatible with them.
A report cited in the book found that software developers in the 1990s routinely missed ship dates and deadlines. The pressure to reduce costs and keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing market is now dependent on faster software development. With growth and competition in commercial software development came new technology that changed software forever. The new graphical user interface (GUI), networked personal computers, and the client-server architecture demanded new development and testing tools.
FreeAgent is a feature-rich, cloud-hosted accounting platform intended to help small businesses and freelancers. It is relied upon by more than 60,000 businesses with its ability to bring together and manage all aspects of financial operation. The software comes with an array of tools designed to let you efficiently manage all important financial tasks and processes such as payrolls, taxes, expenses, estimates and invoices, bank transactions, cash flows, time tracking, and your project’s financial performance.
The next phase in the evolution of business software is being led by the emergance of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which involves identifying and automating highly repetitive tasks and processes, with an aim to drive operational efficiency, reduce costs and limit human error.[4] Industries that have been in the forefront of RPA adoption include the Insurance industry, Banking and Financial Services, the Legal industry and the Healthcare industry.
It maybe seen as a trying task but the importance of accounting can never be overstated. This necessary process has resulted in the development of accounting software, which aid accountants and bookkeepers in recording and reporting business transactions. In the olden days, these tasks were done manually with the use of bulky ledgers and journals. Thanks to accounting solutions, these processes, along with reporting tasks are now automated, eliminating the need for the consolidation of manual entries.

While automated testing has been considered essential for organizations, both large and small, to implement in order to deliver outstanding software and stay competitive in the industry, it can be tough to get started. Outlining an effective roadmap, building robust frameworks, choosing the right tools, and measuring the potential monetary impact that automation could have on your delivery lifecycle are all critical components of any successful automated testing strategy, but each step presents its own challenges and costs.

Sahi is a automate web applications testing tool which is written in Java and JavaScript programming languages. It is an open source and helps in performing multi-browser testing. It supports ExtJS, ZK, Dojo, YUI Framework. It also records and playbacks well on the browser testing. . The wait for statements in eliminated by the Sahi technology as it works effectively on pages which have a lot of workloads.
However, actually building automated tests for web applications can be challenging because the user interface of your application might change regularly, because of incompatibilities between browsers and because you usually need to support various server or client platforms. The following tools make it easier to build and execute automated tests for your web application.

Many people have tried to make this point in different ways (e.g. this is also the quintessence of the discussion about testing vs. checking, started by James Bach and Michael Bolton). But the emotionally loaded discussions (because it is about peoples self-image and their jobs) often split discussants into two broad camps: those that think test automation is “snake oil” and should be used sparsely and with caution, and those that think it is a silver bullet and the solution to all of our quality problems. Test automation is an indispensable tool of today’s quality assurance but as every tool it can also be misused.

Though you can still read reviews of them here, three of the small business accounting applications we covered do not appear in the features matrix because they're not quite as mature as the ones that are posted here. Sage One Accounting was developed by Sage, a global software company that sells a diverse family of accounting solutions, both desktop and cloud-based. WorkingPoint is still missing some functionality offered by its competitors, such as mobile access and integration with related apps. ZipBooks is the newest; it had the thinnest feature set when we reviewed it, but it's growing rapidly.

With EasyForm Expense Management, employees will no longer have to physically submit expense reports. Users can take a snapshot of their receipts and easily upload them alongside their expense claims. Thereafter, managers can quickly approve or reject expense claims based on acquired data and audits. The software also utilizes GPS technology for reconciling travel-related expenses by tracking distance traveled during a business trip. Its travel intelligence capability also provides useful insights on how to better optimize one’s cost and spend.

The use of GUI applications introduced the first generation of automated test tools capable of performing record and playback functions. Testers continued to write down scenarios and test scripts, but the widespread use of GUI meant that users of an application now had multiple ways to interact with the software. Testers had to overcome this scenario, and the evolution of test automation tools gained momentum.

You try to enter random data in this form which took around 20 minutes. Then you press submit. Wolla!! An error message is shown which looks like an unhandled exception. You become very happy. You proudly note down the steps and report the bug in your bug management system. Great effort, you feel really confident and energetic. You continue the testing until the day ends and find some more bugs. “Amazing first day”, you thought.

The origins of test automation start with the computing industry. The book, Automated Software Testing: introduction, management, and performance, notes that the history of automated software tests followed the evolution of software development. Software testing in the era of large database systems that supported scientific and government programs meant that a finite amount of test procedures could test a complete system at the end of the development cycle. With the rise of personal computing, the methods for testing software changed to keep up with increased demand for new software applications and new product features.

Intuit QuickBooks Online offers a range of features for all types of small businesses. This includes freelancers, consultants, online merchants, store and restaurant owners, service providers and more. Whether you're just starting out, expanding or have an established business, QuickBooks Online is packed with basic and advanced features to meet your accounting needs. [Go here for a full review of QuickBooks Online accounting software.]

During my three years at Socialtext, I helped maintain a test tooling system through a user interface that was advanced for its time. O'Reilly took it as a case study in the book Beautiful Testing. The team at Socialtext uses the same framework today, although it now has several tests running at one time on Amazon's Electric Compute Cloud. Although we had a great deal of GUI-driving tests, we also had developer-facing (unit) and web services (integration) tests, a visual slideshow that testers could watch for every browser, and a strategy to explore by hand for each release. This combination of methods to reduce risk meant we found problems early.
One way to generate test cases automatically is model-based testing through use of a model of the system for test case generation, but research continues into a variety of alternative methodologies for doing so.[citation needed] In some cases, the model-based approach enables non-technical users to create automated business test cases in plain English so that no programming of any kind is needed in order to configure them for multiple operating systems, browsers, and smart devices.[2]

This book describes how to build and implement an automated testing regime for software development. It presents a detailed account of the principles of automated testing, practical techniques for designing a good automated testing regime, and advice on choosing and applying off-the-shelf testing tools to specific needs. This sound and practical introduction to automated testing comes from two authors well known for their seminars, consultancy and training in the field.

With the experience of advising clients on test automation and architecting their automation journey, TestingXperts is one of the leading automation testing companies that generates the value you always wanted through test automation. Our test automation solutions support your business objectives by designing an automation strategy aligned with enterprise goals. We carry out a detailed tool evaluation exercise to recommend an optimized tool inventory to suit your needs and budget.
Tipalti is a cloud-based payment automation and management software that is known for helping businesses accurately meet deadlines. The solution helps solve problems that include non-compliance, late payments, administrative overload and complications arising from human error. Time spent on financial management is significantly decreased, solving one of the biggest problems facing accounting teams.
Hubspot calls themselves an inbound marketing and sales software, but the software modules come as stand alone or integrated marketing, CRM, and sales tools. The CRM is always free, and sales and marketing tools start at $0 and scale from there. From website building tools to lead generation and tracking modules and drip campaigns, Hubspot covers all the bases.
TestingWhiz has the code-less scripting by Cygnet Infotech, a CMMI Level 3 IT solutions provider which is used for testing automation. This tool even gives a total package of a number of testing solutions which are automated. They are testing of web, software, API mobile app, regression test, optimization, database, suite maintenance, and automation, and testing of cross-browser. Other important features such as data-driven Keyword-driven, testing, and distributed testing are offered by it. Even it has record and playback test automation framework. Continuous Integration and Delivery in Agile cycles along with risk-based testing is supported by this tool.

Digital dashboards, also known as business intelligence dashboards, enterprise dashboards, or executive dashboards. These are visually based summaries of business data that show at-a-glance understanding of conditions through metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Dashboards are a very popular tools that have arisen in the last few years.[when?]

This article uses the term “tester” to refer to the person involved in testing software with automation tools. It is not meant to distinguish by job title or technical proficiency. Jim Hazen describes himself as a hybrid, or “technical tester,” because he can write test scripts and develop what he refers to as “testware.” The trend is to hire for multiple skillsets, but that does not mean the non-technical stakeholders involved in software development don’t benefit from automation testing.

Data mining is the extraction of consumer information from a database by utilizing software that can isolate and identify previously unknown patterns or trends in large amounts of data. There is a variety of data mining techniques that reveal different types of patterns.[2] Some of the techniques that belong here are statistical methods (particularly business statistics) and neural networks, as very advanced means of analyzing data.
SmartBear’s TestComplete is an easy to use automated UI testing tool. TestComplete supports cross platform testing and multiple scripting languages. It also instruments both iOS and Android native apps. In addition, TestComplete offers a record and playback feature and uses the Google Chrome browser to emulate all other browsers. Test Complete does not test on native iOS Safari or Android Chrome.
Ok, you may be wondering why small businesses would need an enterprise resource planning tool (ERP)–especially because these tools have enterprise right in the name, so they should be too bulky for any small business, right? Fortunately, the technology that connects huge multinational corporations has become advanced enough that it can provide the same interconnected resources to businesses on a budget. These are the best ERP solutions for small businesses.
WatiN is inspired from Watir and is a C#-developed web application testing tool. This open source tool supports web application testing for.Net programming languages. It is licensed under Apache 2.0. HTML and AJAX website testing are supported by it. It has integration with unit testing tools and helps in generating web page screenshots. On IE and Firefox, it has automated browser testing and is a local support for Page and Control model.

Watir which is pronounced as water is another tool (Ruby libraries) to automate web browsers. Ruby enables connection to databases, reads files, export XML, etc., and also structures your code as reusable libraries. And moreover, it is an open source library, which gives you the flexibility of automation. Watir lets you write tests that are easy to maintain and flexible.

Paying bills isn't as much fun as sending out invoices, but it has to be done. You may already be managing this task through your bank's website, which may or may not excel at this service. There are few other options online for standalone bill-pay, and the ones that exist have restrictions. Bill.com rules when it comes to supporting both invoices and bills; you'll be charged $29 per user per month for payables automation only. If that's more than you want to pay, you could subscribe to Wave, which is free, and just use its bill-paying tools.